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Supercommittee fallout may infect 2012 election

A supercommittee deal is looking less likely after a fruitless day of negotiations Friday. |
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Washington Sen. Patty Murray, the Democratic co-chair, said the offer “does not meet, even close to coming to meet the issues that we have set out from the beginning: fair and balanced.” A Democratic aide likened the offer to a “10-cent tip” and surmised that Republicans should’ve kept the offer to themselves.

Republicans say their supercommittee members will continue to talk with each other and Democrats over the weekend, but time is running short and optimism is running out.

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The Congressional Budget Office needs a proposal by Monday, and the committee must vote on an offer on Wednesday. It’s possible a vote doesn’t even take place if the two sides decide to pack it in and head home for the Thanksgiving holiday. Both a Republican plan and a Democratic plan can see a vote in the committee next week, quite a statement nearly three months after the panel began its quest to strike a bipartisan compromise.

Both sides were staring at likely failure and are passing the blame to the other side.

Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), co-chair of the panel, said Friday morning that he would work through the weekend to come to a solution, if need be. Almost everyone involved with the process agreed on one element: a framework for a deal needed to be crafted by Friday evening — Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) told the House Democratic Caucus that in the morning.

No such framework was in play Friday evening, and both sides were preparing to explain the legislative gridlock — and pass on the blame — in a round of talk show appearances this Sunday.

“We’re still working,” said Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), one of the 12 negotiators after a Friday afternoon meeting. “I hope we can get there, but I don’t know at this point of time.”

All this realistic pessimism has major implications for Congress, and the national political landscape.

Republican aides and lawmakers realize that if the committee fails to produce a compromise, it will only become more difficult to extend the Bush tax cuts.

“Something could happen, some sort of political event where things changed during the year, during the campaign, where Harry Reid and enough senators say we have to do something on this and Obama changes his mind,” said Rep. Patrick Tiberi (R-Ohio), a member of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee and close ally of Boehner. “Short of that, this is the best time.”

Failure also sparks a harsh trigger mechanism, which cuts into Pentagon spending. The conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page Friday appeared to give some cover, indicating that the cuts to defense spending are not so bad.

Even though the cuts in the trigger don’t go into effect until 2013, the Pentagon has to start cutting. The Defense Department says they’ll have to cut 200,000 troops in 2012.

That has defense hawks shuddering — and vowing to spend 2012 reversing it.

“It’s like the Keystone Cops,” said Rep. Tom Rooney (R-Fla.), a member of the Armed Services Committee. “How to undo what we did and if we can’t for some reason, how do we live with the cards we’ve been dealt. That will be a bad, bad hand.”

Rooney said the downplaying the effects of the sequester is “absurd.”

But the GOP is hardly united on that front. Chambliss said “if the committee doesn’t succeed, “I don’t think at this point in time there needs to be changes [to stop] the triggers from being pulled.”

To be sure, there are escape hatches.

Republicans are considering packaging unemployment benefits and the so-called “doc fix” with a bill filled with spending cuts — a duel-headed strategy to lessen the impact of the sequester by crafting a bill Obama could not turn down. Attaching the AMT and other measures could be a possibility.

But just like with the supercommittee, time is running out.

“I can’t fathom them blinking,” Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) said hours before it appeared talks had all but collapsed.

Readers' Comments (87)

EJ’s right. All you have to do is nothing. Let the super committee fail, the sequester cuts happens, and then let the Bush tax cuts expire. It’s the best deal democrats are going to get. If you’re not willing to sacrifice something, you shouldn’t be part of the conversation.

Corporations have record profits and record cash in the bank and dodge the real tax rate , reducing the amount they actually pay be about a third the published corporate rate.

The top 1% has rising income levels and the lowest taxes in memory.

No taxes are levied on what the hedge funds bring in; they call it 'carried interest' and by doing so escape all taxes.

No transaction tax is levied on rapid fire stock trades that send the market into wild gyrations.

Capital gains (the way most of the wealthy get their 'income') is taxed at 15%.

So, there are plenty of ways to bring our budget into balance without cutting middle class programs.

If the Republicans wanted a 'balanced budget', they should not have passed the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy when we had a balanced budget and should not have gone to a war based on lies and refused to pay for it. If the Republicans wanted a 'balanced budget' now, they could easily have one.

The supercommittee will fail. And it is not surprising when Republicans have many reasons to fear the tea party backlash for taking sensible, rational positions on the issues facing our country.

Many Republicans have been primaried by the tea partiers, and presumably there are only more to come.

The fact that the tea partiers are seldom if ever rational in their beliefs is irrelevant; they vote, and Republicans should be scared. The fact that the tea partiers are sinking our country with their poorly-informed understanding of how the economy works is not helping the recovery, though.

David Stockman, the legendary Reagan budget chief who presided over the Gipper's supply-side tax cuts, announced that the "debt explosion has resulted not from big spending by the Democrats, but instead the Republican Party's embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don't matter if they result from tax cuts." The next day, the former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, who famously helped sell the 2001 Bush tax cuts to Congress, declared them simply "disastrous."

So, see if I understand this correctly: Dem aides to Murray were "offended" by Boehner's offer to give up the forward-depreciation, allowed under Obama's 2009 Stimulus Bill, by basically saying it was an insignificant gesture.

Why, then, was Team Obama so fixated with holding Republican's feet to the fire over the ending of this particular loophole during his recent "Bash Everyone but Obama" re-election tour?

If people didn't know better, they might consider this as a display of blatant hypocrisy on a world class level.

Another failure to come to an agreement will result in the stock market tanking again, maybe back to 10,000 on the dow. That will ugly up people's year end 401k statements, leading to more anger and fear, etc.

We are in a downward spiral, like Europe. There is no way out. Free speech and prosperity will be a thing of the past. Our best days are behind us. I lived for most of my life in an America that was safe, clean, prosperous and optimistic. I am lucky. I feel terrible for my kids, who are living, and will increasingly live, in a country filled with angry people of different cultures, who have nothing in common except mutual suspicion and fear. This is the legacy of totally foolish mass immigration. We have imported the 3rd world, and have therefore become the new 3rd world.

The greatest nation in the history of the world destroyed by the evil act of one drunken murdering jerk, named Ted Kennedy.

Let's see if I got this right, Republicans and Democrats hold hands and skip down the road to a 15 trillion dollar debt and have America standing on the edge of the abyss of financial ruin and the only solution either party can come with is to blame the other. Perhaps it's time for those members of and those who identify with the two major parties to step back and take a good hard look at what they have wrought upon America and the lack of any willingness what so ever to fix it and ask themselves if maybe, it's time to do away with the culpable parties and form new ones that won't put party loyality and alliagence above the needs and future of the United States.

With the Bush tax cuts expiring and the threat of cuts in defense, the Democrats got what they wanted in the end.

The Bush tax cuts expires which means paying 15% on the first 10,000 instead of 10%, it means paying 28% above 34,000 instead of 15%, 31% above 82,000 instead of 28%, 36% instead of 33% and finally 39.6% instead of 35%. These apply if you are single, but you can figure out your own tax bracket. Why are the Democrats so happy to make the poor pay 15% instead of 10% or the middle class pay 28% instead of 15%?

The Bush tax cuts expires which means paying 15% on the first 10,000 instead of 10%, it means paying 28% above 34,000 instead of 15%, 31% above 82,000 instead of 28%, 36% instead of 33% and finally 39.6% instead of 35%. These apply if you are single, but you can figure out your own tax bracket. Why are the Democrats so happy to make the poor pay 15% instead of 10% or the middle class pay 28% instead of 15%?

Why are the Republicans want to lower taxes for the rich while cutting medicare and social security.

Repealing the Bush tax cuts will fix the budget deficit and the Democrats can negotiate to get concessions from the Republicans. It is a win in their book.

All bow before our elected royalty. Their inability to get anything accomplished in the little time it they work is astounding, yet deeply saddening. So much for democracy when they cannot do what is right for this country but pander to the rich, the K streeters and the fringe in each party.

>Why are the Democrats so happy to make the poor pay 15% instead of 10% or the middle class pay 28% instead of 15%?

Sure, the extra tax will hurt, but don't worry: we'll be fine. Like the Beatles song says, we'll get by with a little help from our friends. We're just starting to realize that it's the only way to "right " the tax code back to what it was before the country started going bankrupt.

As the smartest guy in the room, I am afraid we are approaching what might only be called a moment of singularity. It is quite troubling. Singularity theory has applications in technology, mathmatics and even the creation of black holes. While singularity can have positive aspects, in general they lead toward total collapse of the current status quo, redifining the future. Moments of singularity brought us into the age of the automobile and big oil. Singularity brought us out of the dark ages and singularity could very well put us back into the dark ages.

There is a lot of discussion on singularity in regards to artificial intelligence surpassing human intelligence (hence Google's participation in the Singularity University) but the darker side of singularity seems to be appearing in regards to the socieo-military-economic singularity. Think of singularity as a spiral where each period of time gets smaller and smaller until everything happens in one day. If such a mathematical model could be applied to the socieo-military-economic moment of singularity then it would be possible to predict the collapse of civilization. For example, because of the widespread use and instataneous use of communications it is possible for terror groups to reach par with the current status quo by the rapid development of weapons of mass destruction including cyber warfare. If such an even is thrown into economic turmoil, political turmoil and so forth, then the current status quo is threatened. Throw in a Manchurian Candidate such as the US currently has as president (whose claim to fame is community organizing - i.e. occupying protest organizing), then we have yet one more layer contributing to the anti-status quo or moment of singularity.

It appears that the singularity theory is both known to exist and being executed on many fronts. In otherwords, our demise as a society is engineered along known principles. The principle of singularity. And because it is a mathematical model (the final ring of the spiral) the day our our collapse seems to be underway unless it is stopped. The only one that can stop it from the list of candidates is Mitt Romney. Obama is on a path to hasten the singular collapse.

Obama doesn't really care about solving the spending problem. Under his rule, there was never a budget. Obama naively thinks that raising taxes will solve problems, it is just a band-aid and would only temporarily solve things. Spending has gotten out of control and needs to be cut.

The truth is that the global financial system is now operating beyond the scope of known reality. The way the ancient religious civilization handled this mathematical truth was through a concept called a jubillee year. By exercising the jubillee (setting all debts to zero) the moment of financial singularity could be avoided (because of a mini singularity or community wide bankruptcy if you will).

The truth is that the United States and the global economy is stuck on a path toward the day of singularity (or collapse). The irony here is that if we cut defense then attackers will be encouraged (further providing fuel for the day of singularity) and if we don't cut then the budget deficit provides the fuel for internal collapse toward the day of singularity. Right now there seems to be no escape from the mathematical implications without devine intervention from higher intelligence (such as came with the religous rule of jubillee year). But this is impossible because the western world has become anti God and anti higher intelligence (i.e. devine providence). Therefore, mathematically speaking, the US and the western world seems on a path of the moment of singularity. Furthermore, because singulairty is a mathematical model the day of collapse can be calculated based on the space in time between moments of singularity (identified by revolutionary changes in the status quo over thousands of years which are days of singularity). For example, there was a certain day in history where automobiles replaced horse drawn carriages. That was a day of singularity. There was a day when cell phones replaced land line telpehones per capita. That was a day of singularity. Sigular events are marked by rapid changes (leading toward the universal spiral diagram as found in sea shells, plants, galaxies, etc. which are likenesses of the mathematical model).

The thing about moments of singularity is that we can mathematically calculate them we just don't know exactly what the day brings. For example, the day a terrorist group can unleash a dozen nuclear weapons (Iran for example) and challenge the military status quo prevailing in the world is a day of singularity. A solar flare sending EMP shock waves through the solar system could be a day of singuarity (and in fact we can already map out these sun cycles). But days of singularity could also bring positive changes- for example the day that language scientists are able to create an artificial language between dolphins and mankind that is sufficiently non ethnocentric enough to bring discoveries of thousands of years of passed down knowledge. Since dolphins survived the great deluge that Noah survived, they could provide a link beyond the account of Noah as to what was going on with the planet prior to the time of the deluge. That would certainly be a moment of singularity. So we can't always assume that moments of singularity spell disaster and nor is collapse of a system usually the end either since it is likely that the end of the spiral leads toward another expansion. This is called a delta where the singularity of two cones meet. In otherwords, collapse is the singularity of one cone (spiral) and beginning is the singularity point of the touching cone (spiral).

At any rate, mathematically we can no longer support the global debt and it has to be liquidated. Unfortunately we have no model to liquidate it.

With the Bush tax cuts expiring and the threat of cuts in defense, the Democrats got what they wanted in the end.

Obama's rope-a-dope strategy is paying off.

Only an out of touch, elitist liberal would say something like this.

Tell that to the unemployed. Tell that to all those with home foreclosures. Tell that to the record number of Americans on foodstamps. Tell that to those occupiers marching against the Obamaconomy and living in Obamaville tents in parks.